Other books that might interest you

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  A Thing That Glistened - From...

  Frank R Stockton

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  Frank Richard Stockton was born in Philadelphia on 5th April 1834.  
  His father, a Methodist minister, discouraged Stockton’s literary career from an early age.  Feeling unable to go against those wishes it was for many years that Stockton’s income was maintained as a wood engraver.   
  His first work was published in 1867 and his first collection only appeared in 1870.  Despite this late arrival Stockton’s innovative and often far-fetched stories, with a gentle ‘poking fun’ humour were very popular.  Like his contemporary Mark Twain he avoided the scolding, hectoring and moral tones of many other authors and instead gently teased and cajoled his reader to open their eyes to the ills, the greed and the ambitions of the world around them.  His sci-fi stories in particular were far-seeing and inventive including a tale of negative gravity and a bloodless Anglo-US war won by technological feats.  
  Perhaps his most enduring tale though is ‘The Lady, or the Tiger?’ from 1882.  A condemned man is given a choice of being eaten alive or marrying his princess lover.  But he has to choose which door each is behind. 
  Frank R Stockton died in Washington, DC, on 20th April 1902, of a cerebral haemorrhage.  He is buried at The Woodlands in Philadelphia.

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  Ghost Stories of Charles Dickens...

  Charles Dickens

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  "The Ghost Chamber" is the story of a wife's destruction and the love of a young man for an imprisoned girl.
  "Mr. Testator's Visitation" portrays an eerie character who visits an impoverished, unhappy lawyer.
  "A Child's Dream of a Star" is the sad story of a little girl who becomes an angel and waits for her brother to join her.
  "The Signal-Man" tells of an apparition seen at a tunnel where fatal accidents occur.
  "To Be Read at Dusk" is the story of a lovely young bride who is tormented by a sinister face that appears in her dreams.
  "The Trial for Murder" is the eerie tale of a juror who is haunted by the apparition of a murdered man who insists on justice.

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  The Spectacles

  SAMPI Books, Edgar Allan Poe

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  In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Spectacles", a vain young man, neglecting his need for glasses, falls in love at first sight. He later discovers that the woman he has fallen in love with is his great-grandmother, revealing a biting irony about perception and reality.

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  Beyond the Wall of Sleep...

  H. P. Lovecraft

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  In "Beyond the Wall of Sleep", an intern in a mental hospital relates his experiences with Joe Slater, a backward Catskills mountain man and now inmate at a hospital for the criminally insane. The inmate was having very strange and vivid dreams which he described in a way seemingly impossible for a man of his limited intellect. The intern decides to use a device he built but never tested, a device that could be used for two-way telepathic communication to monitor the man's dreams. What he discovers is both astonishing and frightening.

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  The Altar of the Dead - A...

  Henry James

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  Henry James was born 15th April 1843 in New York City. 
   
  His youth was spent travelling with his family receiving what was an "extraordinarily haphazard and promiscuous" education as they journeyed through London, Paris, Geneva, Boulogne-sur-Mer and Newport, Rhode Island, according to the father's current interests and publishing ventures. James studied primarily with tutors and only briefly attended schools.    
   
  Undoubtedly the quality of his writing has ensured his name is enshrined in the American literary tradition.  
   
  James was a committed Anglophile and spent most of his adult life as an expatriate in Europe.  Many of his novels juxtapose the Old World with the New World. Classics such as ‘The Portrait of a Lady’, ‘Daisy Miller’ and ‘The Ambassadors’, display the entanglement between American and European cultures and mentalities. They highlight the differences between the two worlds through following the experiences of American expatriates in Europe.  
   
  A prolific author he was able to easily move across genres to create vivid and totally real worlds and situations and to offer sophisticated observations of human relations as well as realistic, social criticism. 
  As a critic James was unafraid to venture into reviews and essays of those other literary giants around him.  These together with his short stories and, of course, classic novels, make Henry James an author to be not only admired but read, and read often.  
   
  In 1915 Henry James became a British citizen. 
   
  On 28th February 1916, at the age of 72, Henry James died in Chelsea, London. 
   
  He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912 and 1916. He never won. 
   
  In this story James examines the effect that the death of a dearly loved person has on a man’s life.  How he copes, how he grieves and how he attempts to move forward.

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  The Narrow Corner

  W. Somerset Maugham

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  The Narrow Corner is a novel by the British writer W. Somerset Maugham, published by William Heinemann in 1932.A quote from Meditations, iii 10, by Marcus Aurelius, introduces the work: "Short therefore, is man's life, and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells." In the story, set "a good many years ago" in what is now Indonesia, a young Australian, cruising the islands after his involvement in a murder in Sydney, has a passionate affair on an island which causes a further tragedy.William Somerset Maugham was an English playwright, novelist, and short-story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest-paid author during the 1930s.Both Maugham's parents died before he was 10, and the orphaned boy was raised in Whitstable, Kent by a paternal uncle, who was emotionally cold. He did not want to become a lawyer like other men in his family, so he trained and qualified as a physician. His first novel Liza of Lambeth (1897) sold out so rapidly that Maugham gave up medicine to write full-time. In 1915 he wrote Of Human Bondage, widely considered his masterpiece.During the First World War, he served with the Red Cross and in the ambulance corps before being recruited in 1916 into the British Secret Intelligence Service. He worked for the service in Switzerland and Russia before the October Revolution of 1917 in the Russian Empire. During and after the war, he travelled in India, Southeast Asia and the Pacific. He drew from those experiences in his later short stories and novels.

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